HOW COMPETENT ARE ADVANCED (POLISH) LEARNERS OF ENGLISH. THE CASE OF PRONUNCIATION

Fortunately enough, “over recent years there has been renewed interest in the teaching of pronunciation which has resulted in a bewildering variety of new teaching materials being published” (Dalton and Seidlehofer 1994: ix). Besides, as Gonet (2016: 17) claims “(h)eavily accented pronunciation creates an impression of inadequacy, helplessness or sloppiness” that puts a student “at a disadvantage right from the beginning of an interaction with a native speaker” (ibid).

Porzuczek (2015: 187) notes that unpredictability of English pronunciation through spelling cues makes the learning process (of pronunciation) difficult for foreign learners. However, most errors students make (cf. Sobkowiak 2001) are intralingual in nature – as the students “activate” all the schemata about the (English) language experience and knowledge of spell-to-sound relation. Certain aspects of the English language are simply classified as difficult (Szpyra Kozłowska 2011, 2012, Stasiak and Szpyra-Kozłowska 2010, Sobkowiak 1999 among the others) even for the students at an intermediate level and above. These aspects are aspiration of fortis plosives, pronunciation of ‘ash’ vowel, pronunciation of long vowels and devoicing of final lenis consonants.

The following study is a part of a bigger scale analysis prepared for the ALOPHONE PROJECT at Gdansk University of Technology (Polish National Science Centre, Dec. No. 2015/17/B/ST6/01874). The study is a description providing an analysis of the recordings (of Polish advanced users of English) with respect to the four above mentioned categories. There were 612 items recorded (words and short phrases) which multiplied by 8 (non-native, Polish-origin) speakers gives 4896 tokens, out of these 4896 tokens - 3125 were established at a near-native level (NN) which accounts for 64%, the not near-native (nNN) items constitute 36% of the total number of items.